Sunday, April 20, 2014

#310 session: my vision is definitely improving

My vision has improved quite a bit in the past few weeks. It seems as though at least once every week I have a particularly 'wow' day--when I've noticed a particular lot of new information coming into the eyes. I think it was Tuesday last week. I still have some very small hypertropia, but it seems to be diminishing rapidly.

My new regimen seems to be very effective--doing particular emphasis on Finger Monster, and antisuppression Solitaire. When I move the finger monster across my visual field from left to right, I've mentioned before that there is a point where I make a distinct shift from one eye to another. That shift is becoming less and less pronounced. I try to pay a lot of attention to the way my eyes work as I move around the 'hot' zone where my brain tends to want to shift from one eye to another. I do a lot of work in that area, so as to try and completely get rid of the shifting behavior.

This time around with doing antisuppression exercises I seem to know better how to do them. A few years back I used to put in a crazy amount of time into antisuppression exercises like AS Tetris as well as bar reader exercises. AS Solitaire is essentially the same type of exercise, but I now know how to do it, and I also now know what I'm seeing when I do it.

One of the issues which presents itself in AS Solitaire is the out-of-sync accommodation issue. It's difficult to get each filtered eye to see its input clearly simultaneously. There is still the dominance, and the non-dominant eye gets blurred out a little--even if I consciously choose to unsuppress it momentarily.

Now I know how to fix it. Consciousness and attention are key. I try to stay calm, focus through both eyes. Sometimes I'll switch eyes so that I can have an idea of what 'sharp' means for the other eye, and then I'll try to change back to focusing with both eyes. When I do this what I'm essentially doing is overriding my accommodation reflex, trying to get it to accommodate in the right way so that I'm able to focus with both eyes simultaneously while looking at the same spot in space.

This can be done. People do this all the time when doing those Magic Eye hidden autostereograms. They are overriding their accommodation reflex: accommodating their eyes on the page, while diverging their eyes pointing at a spot in space which is behind the book. Now that I know that's essentially what I'm doing when I try to unsuppress for antisuppression Solitaire, it makes a significant difference. If I'm not able to accommodate both eyes while looking at the same spot in space, then there will be a corresponding lack of attention on the input of the non-accommodating eye. That lack of attention will correspond to continued suppression. So moving forward will mean tuning my accommodation reflex by overriding its natural tendencies. This relatively new understanding (3-4 months now), I believe, is responsible for the very recent improvement in my vision.